This police stop and search ending in the seizure of more than $100,000 is at the center of a federal civil rights lawsuit in which the motorists claim they have been victims of unreasonable tactics. (Screen grab from video provided by Iowa State Police)

Federal drug enforcementofficials have issued a new code of conduct for highway police across the country intendedto helpcurb the number of questionable civil seizures of cash and property from motorists.

Senior officials in the federal High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas (HIDTA) program said they are doing soto remind local and state police about the need to honor Constitutional values and the civil rights of motorists. The code is voluntary.

The code emphasizes the importance of traffic safety and the restrained use of an aggressive enforcement technique known as “highway interdiction,” which often involves largenumbers of trafficstops by officers looking for drugs, illicit cash and other contraband.

The code, a series of bullet points, was issued last month to hundreds of officials at the national conference of the International Association of Chiefs of Police in Orlando.

HIDTA operates as a program withinthe White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. Formed during the drug wars in the late 1980s, it provides financial assistance and coordination for local, state, federal and tribal law enforcement agencies. There are 28 activeHIDTA operations nationwide.

Leaders of the programhave been considering questions about highway interdiction and the development of a new code for several years. They moved forward with their “21st Century Interdiction Code of Conduct” after a recentWashington Post investigation found that local and state police had seized more than $2.5 billion in cash from motorists and others since Sept. 11, 2001, without warrants or indictments.

Those seizures were made through an asset forfeiture program at the Justice Department, that allows local police to take cash and property under federal civil lawwithout proving a crime has occurred. The program, Equitable Sharing, allows thelocal agencies to keep up to 80 percent of the proceeds.

Manyof the seizures were conducted byofficers trained in highway interdiction. HIDTA officials said the technique is important to the fight drug trafficking and other crime. “It’s a legitimate and very effective tool,” said Kurt Schmid, director of the HIDTA office in Chicago.

But Schmid and others said some officersmay be using the technique to pad localpolice budgets through forfeited proceeds rather than pursuing criminal cases or focusing on traffic safety.

“We felt the need to stake out another position here. It’s not all about ‘policing for profit,’” said Jack Killoran, director of the HIDTA office in Atlanta. “This is the product of a very robust conversation.”

The ten-point code is written as a pledge. It says that “members of the Domestic Highway Enforcement (DHE) community” recognize they must adhere to the “highest standards of integrity and ethical principals in the performance of traffic safety enforcement activities.” It describes highway interdiction is an “ancillary endeavor;”

The code also addresses the use of informal intelligence networks to share unofficial reports about suspect drivers sometimes without evidence of a crime.Thousands of officers have tapped intothesesystems in recent years. But they have been controversial among some police.

Schmid, Killoran and others worried that police using the intelligence networksmay be unknowingly violating their departments’ rules or the laws governing the sharing of personal and law enforcement sensitive information.

“Potentially, these officers who were filing these reports, they were violating the law,” Schmid said.

The code says that information sharing must be consistent with local, state and federal laws and that personal data must be “lawfully obtained, shared, appropriately stored and available for disclosure/discovery” in criminal cases.